ALEXANDRIA, Virginia, 21 March 2006 — Hollywood couldn’t have made it more melodramatic: After a bizarre week in which confessed Al-Qaeda terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui’s death-penalty trial was sidetracked to examine a government lawyer’s misdeeds, and the prosecutors’ case against Moussaoui verged on collapse but received a last minute reprieve from the same judge who put the government’s case in jeopardy just days earlier, the jury returned this week to hear evidence by the FBI agent who arrested and interrogated Moussaoui weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
FBI agent Harry Samit defended himself yesterday against assertions that he botched the opportunity to gain valuable intelligence about Moussaoui in the days prior to his August 2001 arrest, when a French native of Moroccan descent was being held for an immigration violation.
Samit said that Moussaoui’s lies after his August 2001 arrest prevented him from persuading the bureau to launch the kind of investigative blitz that might have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Moussaoui said was in flight school for fun and intended to visit New York as a tourist, the agent told the jury March 9.
Moussaoui, 37, pleaded guilty to terrorism conspiracy charges last year, so his punishment is the only question before the jury in the trial that began March 6.
Prosecutors contend that Moussaoui contributed to 3,000 murders on September 11 by lying to Samit to cover up Al-Qaeda’s conspiracy to hijack and crash planes into prominent buildings. They are seeking the death penalty.
Defense attorney Edward MacMahon cross-examined Samit yesterday on whether the government could have legally searched Moussaoui’s Minnesota hotel room without first obtaining a warrant. Samit said that in certain circumstances agents can conduct a search on foreign nationals, but in Moussaoui’s case, he and his supervisors determined that it would be best to first arrest Moussaoui. Samit said that the FBI would have launched an all-out investigation if it had been able to search Moussaoui’s belongings. “You blew an opportunity to search… without arresting him?” MacMahon asked Samit.
Samit responded, “That’s totally false.” Resumption of testimony follows a one-week delay ordered by US District Judge Leonie Brinkema after she learned that a lawyer with the Transportation Security Administration, Carla Martin, had improperly coached witnesses on their testimony by urging them to read trial transcripts. That violated a court order sequestering witnesses from exposure to trial proceedings.
A furious Brinkema threatened to throw out the government’s death-penalty case entirely, but later ruled that the government could not present any testimony about aviation security in their case to the jury.
Prosecutors said the excluded testimony was crucial because they needed to show the jury what security measures could have been implemented at the nation’s airports if aviation officials had known of the threat posed by Moussaoui and his Al-Qaeda co-conspirators. Brinkema relented on Friday and revised her ruling, allowing prosecutors to present testimony from aviation witnesses who were unexposed to Martin’s taint.
Moussaoui is the only person charged in this country with the 9/11 attacks. If jurors don’t vote unanimously to execute Moussaoui, then he will be sentenced to life in prison.
To obtain the death penalty, prosecutors must prove that Moussaoui caused at least one death on Sept. 11. They argue he did just that by lying to agents after his August 2001 arrest and refusing to reveal his Al-Qaeda membership and his terrorist ties.
